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When your child's learning disability is caused by a condition like dyslexia it may be easier to get your child the appropriate help because disorders like dyslexia are generally fairly well understood by professionals working with your child. Many learning disabilities, however, cannot be given a name, and without understanding exactly what it is that is causing a child to have trouble learning it can be very, very, difficult to understand what his needs are and how to help him. My now-grown son was a child who struggled with “mysterious” learning problems from kindergarten through high-school. There was no name for my son's unexplained learning difficulties other than “some visual perceptual problem”. The closest I ever got to understanding any cause was when I asked a psychologist who had evaluated my son what causes such a thing, and he replied, “Nobody knows for sure, but some scientists believe that the neurons may not have a coating that would help get messages to the brain.”

I'm not underestimating the issues associated with fairly well understood learning disabilities like dyslexia by any means, but I am aiming my discussion at parents of children with “general” learning disabilities because there are a few things that I now know that I wish I could have known in October of the year my son began kindergarten, when I was called to the school and shocked to hear that my son appeared to be having problems. In order to offer the reader a better understanding of the context through which I came by what I believe “every parent of a child with learning disabilities needs to know” I will tell my son's story first.

My son had completed 24-piece puzzles at two years old. Also at two, he identified all colors except, for some reason that eventually went away, red. (Until he was closer to three and finally identified red I wondered if he was color blind.) He knew his letters and numbers up to five - all at two/two and a half years old. He was adopted from infancy after suffering a skull fracture at the hands of someone in his biological family and being hospitalized, but the things he could do at two and two and a half made it clear, I thought, that no permanent brain damage had occurred. Even if he had suffered any brain injury along with the skull fracture, the younger babies are, the more likely it is that their brain will completely recover.

He was my first son and an only child for five years, so he had the benefit of being with me and having my attention for five years. He was a really well behaved little boy, and from a very early age he'd sit and play for long periods of time (so he had no “attention deficit disorder” as far as I could see). He passed the kindergarten screening with no problems, and all during the summer before he would start school I talked to him about how “school is nice, and you're supposed to have a nice time there, but you have to do what the teacher tells you to do”. He was a very mature little boy emotionally, so he didn't have a problem understanding that if it was time to sit and color that's what he needed to do. He was, however, a very gentle little boy - not all that intimidated by rougher boys, by any means, but not one of them either.

In October I was called to the school because the teacher noticed my son did not appear to “recognize letters, numbers, or colors”. She said he was an “introvert” because he would not “join a group uninvited”. She was a teacher who did not have much control over the class and would stand in the middle of the room and raise her voice to get the children's attention, so she may have become so accustomed to more rowdy children my son seemed more of an introvert to her than he really was.

I told her what my son had done at home since he was two, and she didn't seem to believe me. She showed me his papers, and I couldn't argue with what she said about his performance. While I knew she was wrong when it came to his being able to recognize letters, colors, and numbers, I realized that what she was reporting to me was accurate. She brought up having him undergo a Chapter 766 evaluation, and I told her I thought it was too early to jump to this conclusion, and I'd like to hold off. My very tuned-in son was very aware that there was an issue, and I think it may have contributed to his feeling he “was a problem”.

My son's kindergarten year was one of discussions with the teacher and my thinking my son may have just been too nervous in that classroom, where the teacher often didn't seem to have control. A few comments she made were out of line, and I didn't think much of her, and then the year ended. A few weeks into his first-grade year I was called by the new teacher. This was the beginning of a series of meetings with teachers and learning specialists and school counselors that would continue throughout my son's school years. When the first-grade teacher and learning specialist asked me to agree to have my son tested I told them I was willing to have his verbal and math skills tested but did not want things like his speech tested (which they offered) when he spoke as well as an adult. I received the paperwork in the mail for the 766 evaluation, and one of the things they wanted to do was have him go with someone from the school to a local state hospital to see a physician. I did not want my shy six-year-old to be brought to a doctor without me and by someone from the school for a physical exam because I had a pediatrician and found this “offer” too intrusive and too inappropriate. I crossed out what I found offensive on the form and agreed to have my son's verbal and math skills tested. When the tests came back and showed he seemed to have a “visual perceptual problem” I agreed that he would receive special help in those areas.

My son had had, at four, a psychological evaluation as part of a follow-up to the adoption. He tested extremely well and in most areas tested at a level equal to one that seven-year-olds would be expected to test at. I showed the results of that evaluation to the school officials in an attempt to prove that what I was saying about what he had done at home so early was true, and the principle told me, “We aren't going to accept the word of someone you hired to test him.” (He didn't know the circumstances under which the evaluation was performed, and I didn't want the school to know my son was adopted because I worried that would “get them going” on “really believing he had problems”.

Throughout his school years I tried to get answers, find answers, figure things out. There was always the school's “expressing concern” and, essentially, my saying I acknowledged there was a problem but didn't always agree with either the degree to which they said the problem existed or with their way of addressing it. My son was a very bright little boy, and I wanted him to have the chance to have a mainstream education, even if he got some help from a learning specialist. The small group of children in the full-time Special Ed class had completely different issues than he did, and I was concerned that Special Ed classes may not challenge him in the way that students in mainstream classes are. As always, the problem was that I knew SOME of what the school people said just wasn't correct while SOME was. When our family moved to a new school in the same town my son was in fourth grade. I was called to discuss this school's plans for him, and at a meeting of about twelve people the speech therapist announced she would set up an appointment with my son. The principle asked her, “Why are you setting up an appointment? Do we know he has a speech problem?” Her reply was, “We can ASSUME he does.” I began to say my son did not have a speech problem and never did, but the principle spoke more quickly than I and said there was no need to set up this appointment. I was, needless to say, disgusted at some of the over-zealousness of people who seemed so in need of having enough students to “help” they often “assumed”. At one point a learning specialist pointed to a board with a list of names of Special Ed students and said, “See all those - those are all the kids that get help. There's no stigma to it.” The board contained far more names for one class than the 10% usually said to have learning problems. One grade of about 50 kids had about 25 kids getting special help in my middle-class suburb.

It happened, too, that I was covering some local meetings for a newspaper; and one evening while I was covering a nearby town's school committee meeting the issue of foster children and other kids from non-nuclear-family-homes came up as Special Ed was being discussed. AGAIN, I heard someone (a school committee member) say “We can ASSUME these kids have special needs.” I was horrified to see the freedom to assume that so often went on with children who were foster children, adopted, or the children of single mothers.

My son's school experience remained a struggle for him right through high-school, and I was always trying to figure out how I could help, how they could help him, and what any number of other answers were. It was a heartbreak and a mystery. I had a son who brought stacks of books to bed with him each night and who read all kinds of things and memorized all kinds of things (capitals of foreign countries, locations of remote countries, states and capitals) just because he enjoyed doing it, but who did poorly in many subjects in school. Part of his problem was that he lost ground in those very early years, but that wasn't all of it by any means. He was an atrocious speller and far below grade/age level when it came to this. There was even one eighth-grade meeting at school in which the principle pointed his finger at me and said, “This is your fault…!”. After that particular meeting I wrote to the principle and the school department and explained that my son had been a battered infant and that I had two other (biological) children in the school system who were more than three years above grade level.

I had begun studying up on learning disabilities, underachievement, giftedness in children and even material related to the neurological system when my son was about six, and for eleven or so years after that I continued my reading and researching in my attempt to find answers. I would wait until everyone in the house was asleep, do a few things, and then, after Nightline was over each night, I'd begin my reading and researching until 3:00 a.m. or beyond and then get up by 6:00 a.m. I was exhausted, but as my son moved from one year to another in school I kept thinking it was becoming more urgent to find the answers. When he got out of high-school (not all that successfully) I remained somewhat obsessed in my quest for answers, but my son, at 18 or so, began looking for his own answers about all the issues he had developed in medical and psychiatric reference materials. He would read some things to me that he found interesting, and it was clear he understood quite easily what he had read. This was the boy one teacher had told me would grow up illiterate!

Once my son was out of school for a few years but was still trying to figure out what area of work to pursue seriously I still tried to find answers, but I was less intense about reading as much as often. As a person without medical training and without background in the areas I was studying, I had the disadvantage of not knowing exactly where I should be looking or what questions I should be asking about a learning disability that had little explanation. I was the only one who really knew what my son could do well because even he had gotten to a point where he didn't realize some of what went on while he was child and not included in discussions. He had - years earlier - come to underestimate his own ability.

My son was about 27 years old (three years ago) when I heard how stress can cause elevated cortisol levels and elevated blood pressure, both of which can cause difficulty concentrating. My slim, non-smoking, non-coffee-drinking, son has known that he has had high blood pressure since he was about 18. When I read more about elevated cortisol levels I once again began to think back to how my son was a quiet boy and not used to having people yelling (we didn't yell in our house). I knew he had acted nervous when he would enter the elementary school, and I began to wonder if I, indeed, was at fault, just as that principle had stated in his arrogant and impatient voice. What if I had raised my son in a way that made him “too much of a little gentleman” in a school where boisterous and rough boys outnumbered the quieter ones. I asked if I should have tried to make my son more boisterous and rugged and aggressive, but I knew I had raised him the way I thought was right; and I didn't even think I knew how to turn a little boy like my son into a different kind of child. My two younger children were like he was when it came to not being aggressive or boisterous, and they were at the top of their classes. My husband had years before said we should “pull him out of that school” and move to a town where the children were more like he, but moving was out of the question. With my new awareness of what elevated cortisol levels can do I was really beginning to blame myself all these years later. I had seen the price my son had paid as a result of his learning problems. I asked, “What on Earth did I do to this child and not the others to cause all this?”

Not too long ago when I was researching the Nature/Nurture issue (which has become kind of a “spin-off” issue in which I've developed interest) I ran into the www.zerotothree.org website, where there is an extensive discussion of brain development during the first three years of life. It talked about the importance of the right nurturing in helping babies' and toddlers' brains develop the brain connections (synapses) needed for any number of tasks. The material included references to ways that the child who feels insecure or who has a mother who is not skilled at knowing how to develop the right brain connections can lose the potential to form the right connections. In essence, the brain becomes wired insufficiently or inappropriately, and consequences can include problems with the immune system's functioning AND with the brain's having an inappropriate response to stress and then triggering the process by which the wrong levels/combinations of brain chemicals and/or hormones get released for the rest of the individual's life. In other words, the person with the wrong kind of “wiring” from infancy will have more of a stress reaction to even minor stress than the person with the proper “wiring” will.

This could explain why my two younger children, who had a normal amount of nervousness when first entering school or when beginning a new school year, may not have had too much cortisol triggered by this normal nervousness; while my oldest son experienced the same kind of stress but had a stress response that was inappropriate to the degree of it, which may have resulted in cortisol levels that were high enough to affect his ability to concentrate in his early school years. There is even the chance that once he began to experience these school problems he became more tense and nervous and insecure, which could have worsened his cortisol levels. Since elevated cortisol levels are associated with high blood pressure I am assuming that my son's inappropriate response to stress remains with him today and could be responsible for his high blood pressure. I don't know all that went on in the first three months of my son's life, but I do know it was enough to result in a skull fracture and in his being placed for adoption. It was not the stuff that a sense of
security is made of.

Not all children began life as a battered child, but there are enough circumstances under which unborn children, infants, and toddlers may be developing that could contribute, at one point or another or for any period of time, to a situation where just some little thing isn't quite right and the developing brain wires itself in a way that will result in an inappropriate physiological response to minor stress. There is also the chance that a child with a generally gentle nature could feel more threatened by some activities or voices or situations.

Children who are particularly emotionally mature are also usually more sensitive, so it is possible that more emotional maturity could actually backfire in a child who is also very non-aggressive and more likely to be just a little more tense in certain school settings.

After running into the Zero to Three site I did some more research to see where else I could find similiar material. I found enough of it to be able to feel confident that the cortisol connection could be the answer. (Maybe it wasn't my fault after all, Mr. Griffin.)

I wish I could go back to 1981 and know what I know now. Maybe my son's whole school experience could have been different. Maybe my sons whole life could have been different.

What every parent of a child with learning disabilities needs to know:

1. While I am not claiming to know the cause of your child's learning problem, consider the possibility that the “cortisol connection” is something about which you should ask. If your child has, for whatever reason, an inappropriate stress response to the school setting (or anywhere else) there may be ways to alter some things in his environment enough to help him calm down enough to be able to concentrate. (Isn't it interesting that my son could concentrate to read or do other things at home when he couldn't concentrate in school?)

2. If there is the chance your child is having difficulty concentrating as a result of elevated cortisol levels ask if there is a way to determine whether the child is under so much stress in school (or in life) that any stress response he has is appropriate and whether there is a way to determine if your child is over-responding to normal stresses. Dealing with these two different situations would probably require different actions.

Consider looking to what is around him as a source of stress in addition to looking at him as the one with the problem. Consider whether the school environment may not be conducive to his learning, but also consider that someone or something in his home environment could be causing him to be stressed (even if its something as simple as being the youngest child of a bunch of older brothers).

3. Be aware that professionals, so accustomed to seeing learning problems, may be more inclined to be a little too over-zealous when it comes to assessing the degree of disability your child has. When people spend years studying how to help someone with a certain type of problem there can, for some people, be a subtle desire to find more people to help.

4. Although the child who loses ground in his early years is likely to remain behind in subsequent grades as a result of losing that ground, try to sort out where his school failures can be traced to difficulty learning new material and where it can be traced to his having lost ground in previous years. These are two separate school problems that must be addressed separately.

5. If your child appears to have difficulty concentrating ask him if he will try to read aloud rather than to himself, even if he just whispers aloud. I have learned that when stress compromises ability to concentrate it can help for a person to read aloud and take in the information by listening to his own voice rather than trying to get the information from the page straight to the brain through a higher level of concentration.

A Final Note: I can't go back to 1981 and start again, knowing a little more this time and maybe knowing enough to be able to head off years of school difficulties for my son. The only thing I can do is offer the above material in the hopes that it may give you some ideas about questions to ask in time to maybe head off some of the same kind of long, difficult, journey for your child - with love.